Track You Down
by gypsy season
Summary: When Cuddy asked House if he was experiencing any side affects from the ketamine, House lied. Chapter 4 features the most unconventional differential yet.
1. Chapter 1

Terrified that he'd put too much strain on his leg and the pain would return, House took his time getting to the door.

Pulling it open just enough for him to see Cuddy standing in the hallway, he stuck his head out. She was wearing the pink suit, he notes immediately, ever the professional.

"Hi." She said, innocently enough; it put House on edge.

He flattened his palm against his side of the door so that if she tried to come in, he could easily slam it in her face.

"What do you want?"

"Is this how you treat all your guests?" Cuddy said, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Aren't guests usually invited over?"

"I came to check up on you."

"I get the feeling that this is all part of your master plan to get my sperm, or something." He drummed his fingers on the door, trying to read Cuddy as efficiently as a month-long absence allowed. "The search for baby's daddy continues."

She made a face, like she just sucked on the rinds of a lemon. "You haven't come by the hospital. I need to see how you're doing."

The perpetual twinges in his neck and stomach were the only reasons why he let her in. "Fine," he said gruffly, letting go of the door so that it slammed into her arm.

Cuddy noticed the limp right away, when he turned and walked away from her. Although it was nowhere near as pronounced as it had been before the ketamine, and his cane was nowhere she could see, she paid close attention to his leg.

It seemed that the limp was just House being careful, because when he turned around to see if Cuddy had come inside, his face was neither drawn nor wrinkled with any tension, meaning there was no pain to give him stress. And she noticed that his pockets weren't rattling.

So his pain free state was actually from the treatment and not from the drugs. But knowing that House would only deny it if she brought it up without the proper leverage, she didn't mention it.

"If you could let me look at—"

House had already begun unbuttoning his shirt. "This?" he asked, revealing a white bandage covering the site of what Cuddy envisioned being a twisted, half-healed scar, a mass of angry red and purple skin.

"Your leg," she told him, to distract herself before House could peel off the bandage.

"Why? Don't you care that I've been shot?"

"I trust my surgeons."

"Good thing I'm not a surgeon, then," House said dryly, reluctant hands working the drawstring of his pants. As standoffish as he might have been feeling, he was definitely scared about his leg. Even though it didn't presently hurt, it kept him up at night, kept him waiting for just the slightest twinge that would most likely send him into a panic, finally confirming that the treatment had not worked.

Despite all the assurance he was given, he never could fully accept that his leg might actually have healed. After all, it was only a 50 percent chance; House was used to working with shittier odds than that.

"Compared to freaky German science, bullet wounds are like…" Cuddy paused, searching her brain for a sufficient simile, "splinters."

"Splinters," House repeated with a touch of bewilderment and a whole lot more resentment. "If only you were there when they took me off the morphine."

He set his jaw and dropped his pants, holding back nasty comments as Cuddy knelt down in front of him to examine his leg.

"Nothing new going on down there," House assured her. "I've checked."

A gentle poke was Cuddy's only response. She struggled to remain focused, trying to dissociate herself with House, trying to separate the leg from the man attached to it. She had to force herself with all the willpower that she possessed to look past the horrible scar, the mangled thigh, and see it from the perspective of someone who was not ridden with guilt. Nietzsche would have been so proud; it was just a damn leg.

A defiant thought rose from the back of her mind and informed her that Stacy had said exactly that when tried convincing Cuddy to cut it off. She wanted to say she was sorry.

"Has there been any new pain?" She asked the muscle.

House replied with an impatient "no."

"What about side affects from the ketamine? Blackouts, hallucinations-"

"Still no."

Cuddy noticed that House was balancing his weight on both of his legs, probably without even realizing that he wasn't leaning to one side. When she was satisfied, she stood up and met House's impatient eyes with a smile.

House pulled up his pants hastily. "Is that all?"

"I'll look at the… other wounds, now." She couldn't bring herself to say bullet wounds; it was still a shock that someone had just waltzed into her hospital and shot one of her doctors. If she didn't think about bullets and guns, then she could pretend that House had been injured any other imaginable way (crashed his bike, fell, was attacked in some alley and not in _her_ fucking hospital).

"I'm a doctor too, you know," he said stubbornly, swatting her hand away from his stomach. "Not yet!"

Carefully, he peeled the bandage off his stomach, wincing ever so slightly, so that Cuddy had to smile at his sensitivity. She considered mocking him about it, but the sight of the wound on his stomach kept her quiet and sympathetic, because it looked just as she had imagined it would.

House waited until she was fully satisfied before he kicked her out, claiming he needed his beauty sleep.

"It's scarring nice enough," Cuddy said as an afterthought, watching closely as House taped the bandage back over the wound. "Just, yeah you know what to do."

"I do," House said brightly, his words dripping with disdain. "Would you believe I went to medical school?"

Cuddy smiled despite herself. "I'll come back later in the week to check on you. So Saturday, could you please be here?'

"Yeah. Nowhere else to go."

"Thank you," she said genuinely, and left, closing the door behind her as she went.

---

So when, two hours later, a knock on the door revealed Cuddy, coming over to check up on House (for the first time since he was discharged, she said), House was seriously confused.

"Is this how you treat all your guests?" Cuddy said, letting herself in.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

"What is this, Sesame Street?"

"I was thinking more like Mary Poppins, actually," Wilson said happily as he brushed crumbs off House's coffee table and into his cupped hand. "Just wait until I fly up the chimney."

For the third day that week, House and Wilson were locked in a game of 'keep the cripple busy,' which soon turned into 'keep the doctor busy' once House noted that he was still referring to himself as "the cripple." But a rose by any other name would still smell as clean, what with Wilson scrubbing every surface, sweeping every floor, and doing everything in his power to make House think of him not as "the friend" but as "the maid."

"Well you're not paying attention," House said impatiently, pointing to the television while Wilson headed for the kitchen. "You can't just listen to Passions; Passions can't just be background noise. You have to _watch _it."

Wilson gave him a skeptical look and disappeared behind the door to the fridge. "You might be the only person I know who Tivo's soap operas."

"They play really good commercials," House said. "I heard you need new cleaning supplies, or do you have more soap in your carpetbag?"

"Do you want this beer or not?" Out of the corner of House's eye, he saw Wilson holding up two cans of beer. He stood in the doorway and made no move to come any closer.

"I can walk now, jackass. You can't use that argument anymore."

Wilson looked embarrassed. "Point taken." Gone were the days of Wilson using as leverage the things House wanted but would have needed to walk to get. What had originally started as a subtle way to get House on his feet after surgery ended up as Wilson milking House's cripple card for all it was worth in his own favor.

"But did you really forget?"

"What?"

"That I'm not a cripple anymore," House said. Obviously.

"Yeah, but you forget all the time."

"Eh." House pursed his lips. "You never had a limp to get used to."

"No, I just had to learn to match your gait when we walk."

"Are you serious?" House said incredulously, his face an obvious display of surprise; he had turned away from the TV to face Wilson, which was just another sign that Wilson had just confessed something that House had honestly never noticed before.

"Nah," Wilson said, to avoid the awkward conversation that would have had to happen. Because who the hell intentionally matches strides with another person just for the hell of it? But it didn't matter; there was nothing to talk about. It had only taken Wilson about two weeks of walking next to House for picking up on his steps to become natural and unconscious.

House had already forgotten Wilson's last comment, already looking back at what appeared to be a stiff, over-choreographed rape scene. Wilson watched too, but his mind was elsewhere.

"Have you ever noticed," he said at the next commercial break, "that every soap opera really has only three or four settings? There's the hospital, of course, and some kind of mansion. Then there's the courtyard, and finally, if they've run for 6 years or so, they have a restaurant or local hangout."

"Are you done?" House said, taking a sip of beer. Honestly, Wilson could talk for hours. "Because for a man as closed-minded as you, you sure have a lot to say about the things you hate."

"All I meant was how two-dimensional it is." Wilson protested, growing slightly defensive.

"Two dimensional?" House shouted. "It's television! What do you expect?"

"I don't know…" Wilson trailed off, thinking of an answer that won't sit badly with House. "It just doesn't seem very real."

"Okay. You make fun of my shows, my cleaning habits, and my music; Get out of my apartment." But there was no threat in his words, for he had no intention of kicking Wilson out.

They watched in silence for the next half hour or so, until Fancy was sobbing (Wilson could only remember her name because it was so bizarre) and some guy who wore eyeliner was holding her and trying to be supportive.

'_Oh Fancy, I thought you were dead!'_

'_But I love you… you know that.'_

Wilson watched with wide-eyed fascination at how these scripts actually became more than just useless stuff to set on fire. He honestly could not imagine who would look at a script like this and feel the imperative to actually shoot it.

"Want to know something?" House asked out of the blue.

Wilson was never one to deny what might as well be a good conversation. "Sure," he said in a very riddle-me-this tone. After all, it was their third beers that Wilson had just retrieved from the fridge.

"When I a kid," House said, not taking his eyes off the TV, "around the time of middle school, I liked to pretend I was dead."

"What did you do? Walk around with a sheet over your face and yell 'boo'?"

"No, but now I have a new clue as to what makes Jimmy happy." House said, adding as an afterthought, just incase Wilson wasn't paying attention, "The naughty kind of happy, I mean."

"So… you'd pretend to be dead?"

"I would lie down somewhere and when someone came close, I'd breathe really slowly and shallow, so nobody would see my chest moving." He paused to take in the look on Wilson's face; the corners of his mouth were twitching into the humble beginnings of a smile, but his eyes were shining with disapproval and something else, most likely skepticism. "Usually, I'd wait for whoever it was – it was usually just my mom – I'd wait for them to start crying or panicking a bit before I'd jump up and yell surprise."

Wilson took a slow, deep breath and let it all out in a sigh. He looked at his knees, nodding his head a bit, as if to tell himself that yes, House had just said what he thought he said. Then he looked back up at House, who was looking at him with wide, expectant eyes, as if to say, 'hey asshole, I just poured my soul out for you to scrutinize. This is a silver platter! Come on.'

As disturbed as he was, Wilson would not disappoint. "So… you'd pretend to be dead?"

"Mmhm." Like it was the most casual thing in the world.

"You are so messed up," Wilson said with a laugh and a shake of his head. "I don't even think you realize it, but that was the single most disturbing thing

"If you had as many friends as I didn't, you'd probably do some weird things too."

"Yeah, like hang out with a creep like you." While House was surgery, recovery and then the coma, this was what Wilson had missed the most; the conversation, the picking and prodding and poking at each other in an effortless and natural way which he had mastered over the years of knowing House.

Wilson was a man of many friends, or many acquaintances, as House loved to remind him, but there was no one else who would say "jackass" and mean it as a compliment. Perhaps being friends with House had worn away at his sanity, because there was no sane reason to like being mocked and offended, but at least then he could bask in the warmth of ignorance.

Now that House was relatively pain free and walking unassisted, his mood had improved with flying colors. While he would always be the same House on the inside, on the outside he had become House v.2, now free of scowls and deep lines of stress and pain on his face.

"Cold, James. Very cold."

"I'm a doctor, not a blanket."

---

When Wilson insisted around midnight that, despite having been drinking, he should drive himself home, House was so surprised the oncologist wasn't insisting on staying and watching over him, that he shooed him out with the parting equivalent of open arms. Once alone, House made his way over to the piano just in time to notice Wilson's car driving down the wrong street. The car did not drive off in the direction of Wilson's house, but in the opposite way.

House wasn't sure why, but he planned on checking Wilson for hickys later that week. Ghosting his hands over the keys, he did not realize until 14 minutes later that he still hadn't played anything. But he was alert, sitting upright; but he could not remember a single thought that had gone through his mind during those 14 minutes. First he was thinking about Wilson, and then he was puzzling over how 14 minutes could just disappear like that.

He sat up a little straighter, and played Mozart as fast as he could, to keep himself puzzling.

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

In his dream, he was running, he could always run in his dreams, and it's so real that he can feel the wind blowing through every bit of stubble on his face, through every strand of hair on his head, through his eyelashes, making his eyes tear up. He could feel the wind blowing over every fiber of his body, like a caress. It felt so good.

Sweat dripped down his face, his arms, and his legs, which were working, all in tandem with the other. He had never sweat this much working this hard on a case; he hadn't been pushed this hard since that time when he was put into a ketamine-induced coma and wanted to make his leg strong again.

The process of strengthening his leg was like trying to make something from absolutely nothing, though, and it hurt like death. But the profits were like none he could ever have hoped for. His leg was killing him, but only because he was running. The rest of him hurt just as bad.

As he ran, he passed the world so quickly that it all felt even more insignificant than it ever did before. He could feel the wind, hear it howling.

"House."

The TV was on. The voice was Wilson's, and was just enough to snap him out of his… what was it, a day-dream? He was on the couch, just watching the television, as it would appear to Wilson, who was standing at the door. This all felt so sudden.

"Leave the flowers at the door," House muttered as America's Next Top Model swam into focus. His cane was in his hands, with the bottom firmly planted on the floor.

"Did you…" Wilson trailed off as he let himself in. "Are you using your cane?" he voiced in genuine concern.

House shook his head. "Habit," he said, curling his finger protectively around the handle.

"Well it's time to stop dramatizing and do something about it. Get over it" Wilson said, stepping between House and the TV. "Want to go for a walk?"

House peered up at him curiously. "Do you even realize how much you sound like the nurses in PT?"

"I doubt the nurses in PT ever called you pathetic."

"Come on, now, on your feet! It's an up-hill climb!" House said sarcastically. "Pearls of wisdom which I have cherished so dearly these past few years. And don't-"

"Is encouragement really that bad?" Wilson cut him off. "Does it hurt that much?"

"Don't call me pathetic," House repeated, and then added as a defense, "I was shot."

"In your leg?"

House clicked the TV off and stood up unassisted, with Wilson hovering close by, just in case, until an unfriendly and threatening glare made him take a step back.

"It's humiliating. Much like being seen in public wearing jogging pants." Now he was back to talking about being encouraged. Following House's mental tangents was harder than it looked, and Wilson could only manage complete conversations with him because of how long they'd been friends.

"Which I am bestowing on you," Wilson said. "The humiliation, I mean. Not the pants."

"But I like your pants."

All through the first stages of recovery, Wilson refrained from rushing. Ketamine was a risky treatment, one whose effects weren't even entirely known. There were all kinds of dangers that went along with it, not to mention five years of emotional baggage for House, and what might as well have been ten years of liver damage.

So now that there was a real chance to get better, an actual window this time instead of a postcard, there was no time to waste to see if that window was going to stay open.

The hardest part for Wilson was to accept that what they were doing, what they had been doing for the past two weeks, was not wasting time but taking time.

He just hoped that House would go walking with him. Yes, he wanted House's leg to get better, and he wanted him to be perfectly healthy and off drugs and maybe even happy every now and then. But right then, he really just wanted House to walk with him.

Well, you can't always get what you want. But House did go out for a walk with Wilson. He just ignored him, grabbing his i-pod on the way out and not saying a word until they had made it back to his doorstep, which was almost two hours later.

The next day, Wilson brought his own i-pod, and the mood was mellow, relaxed, lighthearted, until House pushed his ignorance even further and broke into a slow, choppy, but not at all cautious jog.

As he ran, his leg ached, but so did the rest of him, and with equal intensity; he could feel the wind in his face.

---

"I always thought… I don't know, that you just liked to suffer," Wilson said later, under the delusion that House had changed. They had stopped to rest on the stoop of a townhouse. Both men were sweaty and breathing heavily, so that neither felt inclined to deny the break.

"That it wasn't just the leg?" House guessed, turning the tables on his friend's usual guerilla psych assessment. "Or that I liked the pain?

"It was pain that you were used to, a constant, which had completely changed your life. I thought that you didn't want your life to change that drastically again, so you almost embraced the pain."

"Would you embrace it if I killed and tore out the majority of the muscles in your thigh?"

Wilson's silence was enough of an answer.

"There is a flaw in your logic, Jimmy."

"I based my judgment on the fact that you never tried to get off the vicodin, not even when it stopped working." Wilson said, noticing that House was rubbing his thigh with his right hand. "You would lose yourself in your work… you intentionally broke your fingers; I knew you weren't a masochist, so… that was it."

House waited patiently for the silence to follow, and then waited some more, testing the length of Wilson's performance as the strong silent type. "Are you done? Because I am."

"Do you need me to get my car? I can go back and drive here."

"No, not that!" House waved his hand dismissively. "I'm done with being a cripple. You fixed me anyway. The treatment worked."

"What is this? Is this…" Wilson could barely keep from smiling, "optimism?"

"No, idiot. It's rationality." The smile on Wilson's face was nauseatingly happy; House pinched the bridge of his nose and continued;

"I had the treatment, and it worked. I no longer have pain, thus, I no longer need the cane. Hmm… that rhymed, didn't it?"

"So now you're a poet."

"But that's really all there is to it. Cause and effect, and the effect is that I can walk."

"Cause and effect is a nice change," Wilson pointed out. "Refreshing, even, after all the doom and gloom."

"You are disgustingly cheerful."

"Do you want to keep going?" Wilson asked, and House nodded, bracing himself to stand when a hand appeared in front of him, a hand attached to an oncologist who seemed all to pleased with himself, a hand that was there to help him up.

House ignored it and stood on his own. "Are you kidding me?" he said, and took off down the sidewalk, pushing a little harder, to see that Wilson had to push even harder still to catch up with him.

---

His head swam, like he had run too far and was now dehydrated. But it was more like a pain, like the pain in his leg, except it was right between his eyes. It wasn't a migraine, though. Like Wilson had said earlier, it was a pain that he was perfectly accustom to – House recognized it immediately – so naturally, it did not let him think.

"Do you want to run?" Wilson asked from the top of the bookshelf, though he had left over an hour ago.

"Do you want to run?"

Now he was in the kitchen, nagging him, urging him into his sneakers again and back outside where the wind blew much too loudly.

The sick part was, as sure as House was that he was alone in the apartment, he felt compelled to answer.

"I already ran with you. Go away."

"No, House!" Wilson called, coming from what sounded like the bathroom (House could hear his voice echo). "What I mean is…"

And then his face was inches away, his breath uncomfortably warm on House's face. They were so close that House could hear Wilson's thoughts before he ever said them;

"Do you want to run?"

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

House was not aware that he had been sleeping until he was aware of being woken by voices. Three particular voices; He tried to ignore them and go back to sleep.

"Did you get a full history?" Foreman said with a seemingly patronizing tone.

Crunch.

"I'm sure! I never forget things when I'm getting histories, you know that," Cameron replied, on the defensive.

"Then you'll just have to assume that the patient was lying," said Chase, adopting the misanthropic philosophy of his mentor.

Crunch.

"Shhh!"

"Getting an accurate history was your responsibility."

"It's not her fault if a patient lies."

"But it was her responsibility to make sure the patient told the truth."

"Stop it! Our patient is dying!"

It was the shrillness of Cameron's concern that finally got House to open his eyes.

Crunch.

There were his fellows, all sitting atop his bed, and all looking at House expectantly, wide-eyed and eager. Chase was eating from a bag of potato chips in his lap.

"House, your patient is vomiting blood," he said, struggling to talk around the mouthful. Chase always knew just the right words to say.

"Yeah?"

"And there's no internal bleed that we can find," Cameron added.

Foreman pursed his lips, glancing from fellow to fellow before coming back to House. "They got a bad history, and we need to re-evaluate."

"I did NOT get a bad history!" Cameron shouted out of sheer frustration. "I think I deserve just a little respect."

"Hey!" House snapped, sitting up against the headboard. "Don't wipe your greasy fingers on my blanket," House snapped, sitting up against the headboard.

Chase, who had just shoved another handful of chips into his mouth, had just closed his hand into a fist, clenching the blanket in his greasy fingers when House yelled at him. He froze, mouth dumbly stuck mid-chew, caught in the act, considering possible escape routes before just letting go of the blanket and wiping his hand on the leg of his jeans instead.

"So your patient is vomiting blood," Foreman said.

"Your patient had a dog, but had to put it down three weeks ago." said Cameron. "Patient presents with a series of lesions on their face and neck, and they've been playing soccer for seven years."

"What is this, a sequel to Spoon River Anthology?"

Chase, who had been staring silently at his lap, perked up a bit. "I hated that book, had to read it for school."

"Don't you care about your patients?"

"No."

"Don't you care about Wilson?"

"What?' That seemed to come right out of left field, completely random and unprovoked.

"He's worried about you, House," Cameron said, trying to make him feel bad, he could tell.

House tugged at his blanket, trying to get more coverage, but it wouldn't budge on account of it being sat on by his fellows. "Wilson worries about his lint trap," House snapped testily. "I'm not going to feel honored or anything."

"But really," Chase added, suddenly very serious, "he is worried about you."

"One of you, just come out and say it. Is it the leg? The bullet wounds? What?"

"You really don't see it?" Foreman asked incredulously. House shook his head, so he said, skeptical of House's oblivion, "did it ever occur to you that we're doing a differential diagnosis in your bedroom?"

House was alone in his room, alone in his bed and alone in his apartment. He had blinked and everything was gone, even the grease stain from Chase's potato chips, because that was the first thing House had looked for when everything first went away.

Rubbing a hand down the side of his face, House thought about Wilson worrying. But his worrying was obvious, expected, so it wasn't strange for House to have been thinking or dreaming about that. That train of thought was nothing to get worried over himself.

Where was Wilson? Better yet, where were his fellows? They were all sitting there with him, just a moment ago. Wilson must have let them in, so he would be sitting on the couch or waiting in the hall or by the door, or he was in the bathroom.

He was in none of those places when House got out of bed and looked for him, expecting him to be waiting on the other side of every wall, just around every corner. The only signs of life in the apartment were his own. And they had never solved the case; not even Foreman had stayed back to figure it out.

Though House acknowledged that he had been alone in his apartment all night and all day. His rationale knew it. The rest of his mind was just a little tricky to convince.

This was not a good sign.

---

House was halfway out the door when the phone rang. The only reason he jogged back into the kitchen to answer it was because he could, because he didn't need to worry much about10 seemingly innocent steps was going to cost him later. Five weeks into his recovery, and he was finally starting to get used to his newfound mobility.

The number that showed up on caller I.D. was one of the only numbers that ever did.

"I'm going running, don't come over," he said before hanging up the phone. With the events of the morning still fresh in his mind, he yearned for the heat, the tension, the pumping adrenaline of a good run. He breathed in beats of four and allowed himself to think only of the terrain beneath his feet and the tired looking students as he passes them with ease.

Wilson was waiting when he got back, over an hour later.

"You said not to come, but I decided to ignore you," he said, standing up from his seat on the front steps.

House was panting heavily, and pushed Wilson to unlock the door.

"I can see that."

Wilson wrinkled his nose and gratefully stepped out of House's way. "You smell…" he paused, searching for the perfect word, "putrid."

"I went for a run," House shrugged, letting the front door swing shut behind him, so Wilson had to scramble up the steps to catch it before it locked.

"I thought you went running with me," he said, following House into the apartment. "We've been running together."

"Well, papa bird was ready to fly solo," House quipped, unable to stop moving, pacing around the back of the couch and the coffee table on a track that was practically worn into the floorboards. But Wilson knew that this time, the pacing had nothing to do with the words 'leg' or 'thigh.'

Cooling down after a run was a much better habit than popping vicodin and shooting up on morphine, anyway.

"Is your leg hurting you at all?" Frustrated that he had not been running with House, Wilson felt helpless, having not been able to check for any favoring of the left leg or any signs of weight balance issues.

"You must be tired of saying that." House walked into the kitchen, taking strong and even steps. Wilson watched his Achilles tendons and rear calves clench and relax with every step.

"How much did you do?" Wilson decided that he was in no mood to fight for the navigation control of their conversation, so he let the subject be changed without incident.

"I think I pushed 4 miles toady," House answered proudly, filling a glass with water from the sink that Wilson secretly wished could have been filtered.

"That's good," he said. "Last week you were only doing three."

"Exactly," House smiled, licking at the glittering beads of sweat in the corners of his mouth. "And next week,"

"You'll be doing six."

Gulping down the water, House gave a shockingly uncharacteristic thumbs up. Wilson didn't join him in the kitchen, instead waiting beside the couch.

"So, who is she?" House seemed to be asking out of genuine concern, instead of just wanting to know everything about everyone for the mere sake of having choices for future blackmail material.

"I'm…" Unfortunately, Wilson had no idea what he was talking about; "rather curious myself."

"Oh, you are a smooth one," House teased.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." House was always trying to guess who Wilson was dating, mainly because (in Wilson's opinion), House never dated anyone and was jealous.

"Very 007."

"I'm in a hotel. There's no woman." And there honestly wasn't.

"You even have the same name. James." House gasped, condescendingly. "How cute!"

"You're comparing me to James Bond?"

"Nobody does it better," House sang.

Smiling, Wilson decided, "it could be worse." House seemed to have momentarily forgotten his curiosity, fishing the remote out from behind a couch cushion. He was docile now, so Wilson let it go.

"I'm in the mood for Goldfinger," he said, sitting down on the couch, House sitting down next to him, still wearing his sweaty running clothes and still smelling putrid. It was the first time in a long time that House got through an entire movie without reaching for a prescription.

TBC


End file.
